First Bitcoin road trip proved it could be money, even in 2011
Not all heroes wear capes — some drive across the US in the name of Bitcoin
Map and photo from @TheRealPlato, modified by Blockworks
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The world often feels very big. Billions of humans scattered across hundreds of countries, speaking thousands of languages and eating even more types of food.
But no matter how big it may seem, we can still reach out and touch it. You can just do things.
Today’s Bitcoin Legend, Plato, understood that much earlier than almost anyone else in Bitcoin. Fourteen years ago, he set off on a road trip across North America with a pioneering plan:
Make it from the East Coast to the West Coast without spending any dollars.
Only bitcoin.
Bitcoin Legend — The Real Plato
Source: @TheRealPlato
Plato was an early adopter in almost every sense, having first discovered Bitcoin in 2010 and even mined coins when they were worth less than $1.
Inspired by its potential to change the world, Plato was pulled to spread the word. After losing his electrical engineering job in January 2011, by April he’d set off as a Bitcoin pioneer across a land largely unfamiliar with magic internet money.
“I want adventure, and the only other real component is the altruism. I want to help Bitcoin,” Plato said on a podcast one week into his 3,000-mile journey.
The goal: prove bitcoin could work in everyday life, even if few people in the real world knew what it was at the time. He was the first known human to attempt travelling across the United States living solely on bitcoin — using it to pay for food, gas and lodging.
Plato was prepared to educate people about Bitcoin as he went
Bitcoin had the power to reshape our lives in incredible ways, Plato believed, but it would first need to “hit some critical mass” of adoption. He only hoped to “accelerate the process a little bit.”
Friendly strangers from across the US could pin an interactive map with their locations, so that Plato could drop by to barter bitcoin for supplies or shelter.
Mostly, surviving on Bitcoin alone in 2011 meant Plato had to regularly convince others to buy stuff for him with their own dollars, before paying them back in BTC.
A video from the trip shows Plato trading bitcoin for gasoline outside a 7/11 in Salt Lake City. The pair stepped through, sending BTC to each other using keys generated by MyBitcoin, an early hosted-wallet service that shut down due to a debilitating hack only months later.
Meanwhile, bitcoin was experiencing one of its first parabolic price rallies, going from $1 in March to $2 as Plato reached Alabama only two weeks into his trip, having driven 55 miles per hour the entire way to save gas.
Plato’s map: Red pins were offers for gas, blue pins for food, lodging, etc, and green pins marked interesting things.
In Alabama, he gave one of the first college lectures on Bitcoin, a technical breakdown of mining difficulty and transactions in a UXTO system. Bitcoin had climbed to $8 by the time Plato arrived in Denver toward the end of May, where Plato went skydiving and attended concerts.
At one point, having camped out in the woods for days, Plato was offered a place to stay by a friend, whose kitchen had been converted into an ad-hoc home mining setup.
One of those rigs successfully found a block — netting the 50 BTC reward — which was donated to fund Plato’s trip. What was $500 back then would be worth more than $4 million today.
Bitcoin broke past $14 when Plato arrived in Las Vegas. It quickly doubled again to $30 for the first time ever in June, and Plato made it to the West Coast shortly after and posted up in Portland.
On July 1, three months after he started the first ever Bitcoin road trip, Plato shared an update on Tumblr:
“Well, in a nutshell, I made it! CT to LA without spending a single dollar. Since then I’ve been exploring San Francisco and Portland. Somehow I’ve met fewer Bitcoiners in either of these cities than anywhere else, so I’ve been mostly sleeping in my car.”
“Portland is really sweet. It feels like a big city in a small town, in a big city… which sounds stupid but w/e. There’s cool people everywhere, and more culture than a tub of yogurt an art museum.”
Plato introduced hundreds of people to Bitcoin on his journey and continued to use bitcoin wherever he could.
More critically, he proved that Bitcoin could reimagine money by going all-in himself, at a time when Bitcoin was, at best, an esoteric quirk to most people.
For that, Plato will forever be a Bitcoin Legend.
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